Many devices capable of being attached to a network such as personal computers, servers, routers and switches have more than one network interface. Typically multiple network interfaces may be used by the network device to provide connectivity to differing networks or systems, to provide a redundant path to a network, or they may be used to provided increased network throughput (i.e. increased bandwidth).
Occasionally a network interface may fail. When this happens, software applications using the network interface are no longer able to use the network interface to send and receive data, possibly resulting in the failure of the software application.
In some systems, when a network interface fails, the system attempts to migrate the software application to another network device on the same network as the device experiencing the network interface failure. The application then runs on the new network device, often in a manner that is transparent to the users on the system. The ability to migrate an application to a new device is sometimes referred to as “failover.”
Failover capability is useful in providing fault tolerant applications, however there are problems associated with failing over to a second network device. Often it takes a substantial amount of time to accomplish the failover, because application configuration and data must be transferred to the second network device. A user will often notice a delay in the response of the system while the failover takes place. In addition, network connections between the failed over application and other hosts and applications may need to be reestablished because the new application will reside on a network device having a different network address than the original network device. This also can take a substantial mount of time and may result in the loss of data.
In view of the above problems and issues, there is a need in the art for the present invention.